


You Deserve Better

by Abacura



Series: Fulcrum [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Aromantic Asexual CT-7567 | Rex, Gen, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29030397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abacura/pseuds/Abacura
Summary: In the aftermath of Order 66, Rex has only one mission: to protect Ahsoka. He promised himself he'd never leave her side again, so that's where he'll stay. No matter what. He won't let anything else in this galaxy hurt her ever again.Including himself.Especially himself.
Relationships: CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex/Ahsoka Tano
Series: Fulcrum [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2099046
Comments: 7
Kudos: 74





	You Deserve Better

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EyeofMazikeen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EyeofMazikeen/gifts), [Starofwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starofwinter/gifts).



“We should get moving,” Rex says in a somber yet determined tone. “Once the destroyer is reported missing, someone’s bound to come looking for it. For us. And I don’t think we want to be found.”

Commander Tano-

No. Neither of them are commanders anymore.

Ahsoka.

Ahsoka doesn’t reply. She just stands there silently, looking out over the graves of their men. Thinking. Reflecting. 

Rex can’t stop and reflect right now. He feels the enormity of what had just happened, _what they’d done,_ like a dark chasm opening up below him, and he can not, would not fall into it. Not until he gets her to safety..

Rex stows the shovel they’d used to bury his brothers in the Y-wing, along with a few medkits they’d scavenged, giving Ahsoka as much time as he could. But soon there's nothing left to do but leave. Rex approaches Ahsoka, unsure what to say or how to say it. He isn’t even sure what to call her anymore. He carefully reaches out with his good arm and puts a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Kid? It’s time to go.”

She sighs. “I know, Rex. You’re right. Let’s go.”

She sounds so _sad_. Rex feels that chasm yawn a little wider, pull a little harder, feels her sadness calling out to his own where it's locked down somewhere deep inside him.

Not now. Not. Now.

Rex turns and marches back to the bomber. He climbs into the pilot’s seat, careful not to let his injured shoulder slow him down, and gets its engine warmed up. Ahsoka hadn’t followed. Rex sighs and looks back towards the graves. Ahsoka still lingers quietly. After a moment, she takes out her lightsabers and drops them to the ground, leaving them behind as she turns towards the bomber and climbs into the gunner’s seat. 

“You sure, kid?” Rex asks. “They could come in handy.”

Ahsoka sighs. “I know Rex, but from what you said, it sounds like all of the Jedi have been targeted. They’ll just draw attention to us. Besides, maybe whoever comes looking will find them and assume I was killed along with everyone else.” She straps in, and adds in a quieter tone, “Besides, I’ve been getting along just fine without them for a while now.”

That last bit hurts to hear. It's a reminder of how the Jedi had failed her. Just like the Grand Army of the Republic had failed her. 

How he’d failed her. 

Rex grits his teeth as they lift off, heading for orbit.

“Where are we anyway, Rex?” Ahsoka asks, the false cheer in her voice obvious.

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“Rex,” Ahsoka replies, sounding fond but tired, “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ anymore.”

“Sorry sir.”

He doesn’t meant it as a joke, it's just reflex at this point. But it makes Ahsoka laugh quietly behind him, and damn, Rex hadn’t realized how much he needed to hear the sound of her laughing at a time like this. He feels like he had space to breathe. 

“Last I checked,” he continues, “we were somewhere past Myrkr, headed towards Coruscant. Whatever rock that is below us, I’m not familiar with it.”

Ahsoka is quiet for a moment. “There must be other Jedi who survived. I’m sure of it.” She accesses the ship’s communicator. Rex recognizes those codes. She's accessing the Jedi priority channel. A distress signal immediately comes through, the alarm tone accompanied by a red holo symbol that signified a retreat order flashing across the communications screen. 

“All Jedi are being called back to the Temple on Coruscant, to defend against the attacks by…” Ahsoka doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to. The attacks by his brothers.

“It could be a trap. There are a lot of clones stationed on Coruscant,” Rex reminds her.

“I know,” Ahsoka replies. “But I have to believe that the Temple hasn’t fallen. Also, Master Skywalker is on Coruscant. If anyone could survive this, he could.”

The kid has a point. Rex doesn’t want to think about the number of 501st soldiers that had probably died trying to kill the general.

Shit. He might even be the last member of the 501st left.

No time for thoughts like that. Keep it locked down, soldier. “It’s a risk. Even if General Skywalker is alive and at the Temple, it’ll probably be under siege. We barely just escaped that cruiser with our lives.”

“I know,” Ahsoka says, determined. “But I have to try. It’s what Master Skywalker would do for me. Besides, there’s more on Coruscant than just Anakin.” She's silent for a moment, and Rex is wondering who she's thinking about. Friends she made while she'd been away from the Jedi order? He clamps down on and extinguishes the ridiculous and inappropriate feeling of jealousy before it can take hold. That's absolutely none of his business. “But you’re right," Ahsoka continues, "it will be dangerous. I have to go, but you don’t have to come with me.”

“Of course I do.” Rex doesn’t even stop to consider. He’d already decided earlier that day. He's never leaving her side again.

Ahsoka smiles at him. “Alright Rex. Let’s head for Coruscant.”

Rex punches in the coordinates. Time to make some bad decisions. 

Just like old times.

***

...Rex

… _Rex_...

**REX!**

Rex jolts awake to the sounds of the hyperdrive alarm. They missed their stopover and overshot. He quickly dropps the ship out of hyperspace and takes a navigational reading.

“Rex, what happened? You weren’t responding!” Ahsoka sounds worried, almost frightened.

Rex is just embarrassed.

“Sorry sir,” he mutters, “Must have drifted off for a minute there. It won’t happen again.” A minor sublight course-correction and they can jump right back into hyperspace for the next leg of their journey.

“Rex, find us somewhere to put down.” Ahsoka is using what Rex recognizes as her Commander voice. Gods, he remembers her first command, how uncertain she was. Look at her now. He’d be proud if it wasn’t so inconvenient.

“Put down? But we’ve got enough fuel to make it to the other side of the Corsin Run.”

“But you don’t,” Ahsoka counters. “Rex, you’re recovering from brain surgery, remember! You didn’t even have any time to rest, and we haven’t stopped since! And now you’re passing out at the controls. Put the ship down,” she orders.

Rex sighs. He hates it when she’s right.

“We overshot a bit, but we’re still close to the Hydian Way. There will be a lot of ships passing through this sector,” he warns.

“Then take us just a bit further out of the way,” Ahsoka replies, pulling up their navigational charts. “Head for the Denuhi system. There’s only one reported settlement on the eighth planet, but it looks like several of the planets are habitable, and surveys of the fourth planet from several years back indicate enough local flora and fauna to mask our life signatures.”

Rex can’t find a reason to argue. 

“Yes, sir.”

As he punches in the new coordinates, Rex can’t help but feel pride bubble up in his chest. She’s learned so much, grown up so fast in the time he’s known her. She’s a good soldier.

Except she’s not a soldier. She’s a Jedi.

Except she’s not a Jedi anymore either. What did that make her?

What did that make him?

His head hurts far too much to ponder such questions, and his wounded shoulder is becoming harder to ignore. He focuses on the pain, in his skull, in his shoulder, to keep himself from drifting off again.

To keep himself from feeling the pain in his heart. Ahsoka has seen him cry once today. That was enough.

Denuhi Four is in fact habitable. Rex approaches a small continent in the southern hemisphere, taking advantage of the warm, sandy planet’s mild winter. He puts down on a spot along the coast, the ocean on one side and a wall of rocky, red sandstone cliffs on the other. Defensible. The planet’s rust-red sands swirl around the bomber as its engines power down, their hum quickly replaced by the roar of the sea. It looks to be late afternoon where they’d landed.

Rex is halfway out of the cockpit when his injured shoulder finally betrays him, giving out completely and leaving Rex to hit the sandy ground hard.

“Dank farrik!” he curses, immediately regretting it. Ahsoka had been gone for so long he and his men had gotten complacent with watching their language. Before he can manage to sit up, Ahsoka is there, moving as unnervingly fast and silent as ever, kneeling next to him and pulling him up into a sitting position and pulling his helmet off so she can look him in the eyes. She looks… scared.

Of course she's scared. After the day they’ve had? Rex just isn’t sure why all that fear in her eyes is directed towards him.

It’s not as if she knows.

“Rex! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Comm- uh, I’m fine.” Rex tries to brush it off, but Ahsoka is pressing her hand to his shoulder, where his pauldron still carries the scorch mark left by Jesse’s blaster bolt. Rex winces. His armor had held up. Phase 1 always holds up. But it had been a solid hit, and Rex knew there would be damage left behind.

“Take this off,” Ahsoka orders. Rex’s mind briefly shorts out.

“Uh- excuse me?”

“You’re injured,” Ahsoka clarifies. “I need to see how badly. So take your pauldron and your breastplate off.”

Rex doesn’t like where this is heading. Not one bit. But he complies, disengaging the magnatomic seals that kept his armor pieces in place and slowly removing first his shoulder guard, then his left pauldron, then finally his breastplate. Ahsoka hisses in sympathetic pain. Rex’s shoulder guard had absorbed most of the thermal shock of the blaster bolt, as evidenced by the black carbon-scored crater left in it, but some of the heat had made its way to the layers beneath and part of his body glove had actually melted into his skin.

Well, that explains why his shoulder hurts so damn bad. 

“Jesse always was a good shot,” Rex says quietly. Ahsoka, meanwhile, is already digging through one of their scavenged medpacks, pulling out a single use laser scalpel. 

“I’m so sorry Rex, but in order to use a bacta patch I’m gonna have to cut the bit that… melted… off. This is gonna hurt,” she apologizes. Rex wants to argue, tell her he was fine, to just leave it until they could find a medical droid to take care of it, but who knows how long that could take. And he's just so damn tired. So he nods, placing his right hand on Ahsoka’s shoulder.

“I trust you.”

Three small words. Not in the least bit untrue. 

Ahsoka leans Rex back against one of the bomber’s landing struts and starts to pull his body glove down. And in his state, he almost lets her.

“Woah, woah, what are you doing?” he asks, panic edging into his voice as Ahsoka continues to try and get his body glove pulled down.

“Hold your horses, Rexy,” Ahsoka teases, using a nickname Rex had hoped he’d heard the last of years back, “I’m not about to do anything untoward. I just need to be able to get to the injury. I thought you trusted me.”

“I do,” Rex replies instantly. It isn’t that he doesn’t trust her. It’s that his body glove covers something she shouldn’t have to see. Something he never wants to burden her with.

“Then relax. I’ve got you.”

Rex wishes he was still wearing his helmet as Ahsoka pulls his body glove down over his shoulder until she can get at the part of his shoulder where melted cloth and burned flesh meet. To her credit, her hands never shook. She never flinched or looked away. It was over almost as soon as it began.

Kix would have been proud.

The bloodied part of Rex’s body glove is tossed aside and a fresh bacta patch applied to the wound. The cold, almost slimy feeling is immediately followed by warmth and relief from the pain. Rex sighs and lets his head fall back against the landing strut still supporting his weight. He lets his eyes slip closed just for a moment as Ahsoka works his body glove back up over his shoulder.

Then she stops. It’s quiet, and Rex has almost drifted off, the stress and pain of the day finally catching up with him when feels a hand on his left shoulder blade and his eyes shoot open. He jerks away, but something tells him it’s too late. Ahsoka is looking at him, and oh kriff.

“Rex…” Ahsoka says slowly, carefully, “What’s on your back?”


End file.
